Sustaining Illusions

Uncertainty as the fuel of American education

Another piece from my project “Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Everyday Life in the Late American Empire.” —Jim

From the very beginning, education has been an American obsession. Much of the imperative for a literal and figurative investment in it was religious: the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled New England, taxing themselves to educate students—even young girls!—were religious dissidents who placed great emphasis on literacy. That’s because they wanted their children to experience the word of God directly through the Bible, unmediated by corrupt Roman Catholic clergy. This imperative was less emphatic in the middle and southern colonies, especially given the sprawl of American settlement, which made schools more difficult to establish and support. It was also impeded by slavery, as well as the importance of child labor on farms and in early factories, which played a significant role in the economic stability of many American families. Still, as the nation grew in population and territory, a significant proportion of U.S. children had access to some form of schooling. By 1900, Americans were among the best-educated people on the planet and leaders in technological and entrepreneurial activity.

There’s another important aspect here—again, one beginning in colonial times and extending to the present—that played an important role in school culture. And that was a widespread belief in the possibility, as well as reality, of upward mobility, whether economic, social, or cultural: the American Dream.  All societies create some pathway for cream to rise, but in no society was opportunity so widely and openly celebrated—and, for all its obvious limits—tantalizingly possible than the United States. Schools weren’t the only way to achieve it. (After the poor Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie became a wealthy steel magnate, he turned his prodigious energies to philanthropy in the late 19th century, by investing in libraries more than schools, though there too the emphasis was on education.) Business, the military, and the clergy were important avenues of upward mobility in the United States, as they had been elsewhere. But by the middle of the 20th century, schools became the primary way boys, and growing numbers of girls, could achieve success, variously construed, aided by the professionalization and expansion of a series of status-conferring professions: law, medicine, and academia, among others.

Here’s the thing: human beings are incorrigible when it comes to creating social hierarchies. Even when they deny they want to, they can’t seem to help themselves. There’s at least some validity, if not necessity, in fostering inequality, as not all people are born with equal talent, even if they have the same moral worth, and even if we stipulate that the definition of talent may vary depending on time, place, and circumstance. Indeed, it’s the very ambiguity of talent that leads the wiser gatekeepers of a society (who of course are themselves privileged, and thus prejudiced to some degree) to cast a wide net and allow for changing conditions when determining how wide the aperture of opportunity should be. This is why we make distinctions between things like book smarts and street smarts, for example. In the words of musical genius James Brown, “I only got seventh-grade education, but I have a doctorate in funk, and I like to put that to good use.”

But however wide, the gates of privilege always be barred to most who seek to enter (and, in fact, are a series of gates). Americans have long been notable for their awareness of who does and doesn’t gain entry into the elite, variously defined, and their attentiveness to the prevailing rules of competition. Especially because so many people have been encouraged to think the game can be won for so long.

Which brings us to the great paradox of schooling in American life. The core of that paradox, which has multiple facets, is this: achievement rests on a foundation of ignorance. Amid the great expectations that have long governed our national life, you don’t know—and you’re better off not knowing—what you’re up against.

In the United States and everywhere else, every birth brings forth an unformed mass of potential. To be sure, the circumstances by which a child comes into the world can be less than propitious, and, as we all know, there any number of doors may be closed at the outset on the basis of race, sex, or any number of other structural barriers. But the fact remains that countless positive outcomes, imagined or not, likely or not, may come to pass, and most loving parents will consider the possibilities at least as much as the limits.

The key to nurturing an infant’s prospects rests on initially keeping the child’s world quite small, because, as we all know, the world at large can be a frighteningly indifferent, if not hostile, place. At first, little more than a close-knit circle of nurturers, mostly family, are crucial to a baby’s security. By age of five or so a child is legally required to attend some kind of school—a school which, whatever its location, quality, or circumstances, is finite in size. Schooling is a social experience, where skills like cooperation, deference to authority, and the development of autonomy are learned and/or developed to greater or lesser degrees. It’s also where a drive for primacy may also emerge, as competition is a fact of human life.

There’s another imperative that begins to emerge over the course of a child’s life: the peculiar passions among human beings. A love of animals, for example. A fervor for music. Athletic enthusiasm. One complication of such passions is that they may or may not be rewarded in a school setting or in the world at large. (The latter is more important, but school can be a gauntlet that you have to run first.) There are some skills the world rewards handsomely, whether because they’re considered scarce and valuable, or because a few people are exceptionally and pleasingly good at things that a great many people love to do but cannot nearly so well. Though some of these skills, and the benefits that accrue from them, seem to make perfect sense—one would expect people who invent useful things to be rewarded for their efforts—others can seem downright capricious if not exasperating, especially when one considers how many essential jobs pay poorly. Should an ability to throw a ball through a hoop or hurl it into a circumscribed space 90 feet away really be worth dozens of millions of dollars? Doesn’t matter. It is—for now.

There’s an interesting inverted relationship between the accessibility of some aspirations and their attainability. If barriers are entry are low (think: soccer), participants will rush in and participate with a gusto that’s all the more satisfying because it’s widely shared. But if barriers of entry are high (think: fencing), an appetite for participation may be limited, if not delayed, and slowed still further by structural impediments that make that much harder to play a given game, much less excel at it. But the very limits of the pool may make it easier to thrive in the long run if you can attain a certain level of proficiency.

But whatever you may want, however you may perceive yourself, and whichever game you play, sooner or later you’ll become more aware of a wider world in which your ambitions are not considered particularly impressive or relevant. As that happens, it begins to dawn on you what kind of education you’ve received, how good you really are, and the relationship between those two things. And where, as a result, you’re likely to end up. Such understandings don’t typically emerge all at once. You get early indications by things like what level of a course you get placed in, or whether or not you make the select chorus or varsity team. It’s possible in the short term to shake off setbacks. You can make up lost ground in the off-season, or by changing your homework regime, or counting on physical or mental growth to kick in.

By the time you finish high school, you’ve received a clear early signal of your place in the world. If you haven’t been acing your classes, you can still develop a reputation based on your intelligence, your social skills, or any special talents. One fork in the road is whether you go to college at all; another is what that college you attend. You get further feedback from what kinds of classes you take (organic chemistry?), your major (neuroscience?), and your grades (summa cum laude?). There are summer jobs and internships, mentors and collaborators—or not. They situate you.

But the die is not quite cast. For one thing, there are any number of external circumstances that can affect your trajectory: a family crisis, a health problem, an unexpected inheritance.  For another, there remains a gap between performance at school and performance in the workplace. In the 21st century, it appears there’s less of one than ever between academic and professional success, but it’s there nevertheless. And it’s never entirely predictable. We’ve all had the experience of being surprised by the post-graduation histories of our classmates, even as there have been many others who have been about as successful, or unsuccessful, as we expected.

Meanwhile, time collects its toll and gives you your measure. Big breaks and sudden jumps happen. But a law of averages grinds away and you find your level (or, maybe more accurately, your level finds you). You’re never entirely sure why you did—or didn’t—get that job. Or why that foray into this or that turned out the way it did. But the gap between how you perceive yourself and the way the rest of the world does is likely to shrink. You may not believe or accept the worth the world seems to assign you. But it gets harder to dismiss external measures. The ignorance that has cushioned you gets whittled away.

But it never entirely disappears. This is a fact of real significance. At its best, it fosters a genuine modesty about your success, an understanding that it’s inevitably about things beyond your control, even as you must—as a matter of your sanity, your basic humanity—believe you yourself had something to do with it. Less happily, your recognition that you can’t entirely explain how you’ve turned out is something that haunts you, whether as a matter of self-doubt about what you’ve achieved, or a nagging belief that someone or something has stood in your way. The outcome of your life as you’re living it has an unmistakable solidity. But you know it really could have been otherwise, and you find yourself imagining that alternative reality, in some cases vividly. And the friction between what is and what might have been may seem like the most pressing reality of all.

Unless or until you make your peace with it. Have you?